Shannon Bream

This evening on Fox News Shannon Bream, filling in for Megyn Kelly, did a segment about how dismal Hillary Clinton’s future is now that her poll numbers have descended to unfathomable depths, particularly with regard to favorability.

Like much of the rest of Fox’s recent coverage of Clinton, the impression made is that Clinton has about three weeks before she will drop out of the race and report to prison. To open the segment Bream gleefully reported that…

“A new poll now showing Clinton may be more disliked than she has been in decades. As a brand new survey from CNN shows her unfavorability rating is now at a whopping 53%. A number that Clinton has seen just one other time in twenty-three years of polling.”

What the “fair and balanced” propagandists at Fox are leaving out is that Clinton’s favorable rating in the CNN poll that they referenced is better than all of the Republicans that were polled. Clinton scored 44% favorable. That compares to Donald Trump at 36% and Jeb Bush at 34%. What’s more, Clinton’s unfavorable rating is lower than her most likely opponents. She pulled 53% while Trump and Bush were higher at 59% and 56% respectively.

Clinton has had the honor of being ranked as the most admired woman in the world nineteen times in Gallup’s annual survey. She received that honor the last thirteen years in a row. It is not particularly surprising that in an election year where seventeen Republican candidates are bashing her relentlessly her public image might suffer. Add to that the effect of the smear job that Fox engages in every day and it would be a miracle if her numbers didn’t decline a bit.

Notwithstanding those assaults, Clinton is still faring better than her GOP rivals who have had very little mud thrown at them. She is still beating them in head-to-head match-ups. And her support in the Democratic Party is unwavering.

What Fox News is trying to do is project their open disgust for her in the hopes that it will harm her electoral prospects next year. That’s also why they keep promoting Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. They obviously hate them just as much as they hate her, but for the time being they are happy to use them as wedges to create chaos for the Democrats.

If Clinton’s 53% unfavorable rating can be characterized as “whopping” by Fox News, then what would they call Trump’s 59% or Bush’s 56%? Of course the answer is that they wouldn’t call it anything at all because they wouldn’t devote a segment of a primetime program to their “favorability problems.” In the Fox world everyone loves Republicans and they always will win every election. At least that’s how they present it to their dimwitted audience who are later shocked when they lose.

As America’s number one network for extreme, right-wing political bias and propaganda, Fox News relishes every opportunity to disparage their ideological foes and to sanctimoniously exalt themselves as protectors of their twisted versions of the truth. One of the favorite tactics of Fox News is to taunt public figures who make the completely rational decision to avoid the abuse that they would endure were they to submit to being interviewed by the network’s bullies and ignorant partisans. This week there was another example of that attempted intimidation by Fox’s media reporter, Howard Kurtz.

Kurtz appeared on The Kelly File with fill-in host and terrorist profiler Shannon Bream, a former beauty pageant contestant and graduate of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University with no journalism training. The topic of the segment was departing Attorney General Eric Holder’s scheduled interviews with some news networks that did not, as of yet, include Fox. Bream queued Kurtz up by asking “Does he help himself at all by walking out the door and slamming it in our faces.” That totally unbiased question got this response from Kurtz:

“I think that it’s a sign of confidence when any politician, political figure, cabinet officer, congressman, is willing to sit down and take tougher questions from those you might perceive to be your harshest critics. […] Is the nation’s top law enforcement officer really afraid of [Fox News anchor] Bret Baier?”

Any suggestion that Holder, or anyone else who chooses to keep their distance from Fox News, is afraid of them is utter nonsense. That’s like saying you’re afraid of being interviewed by Honey Boo Boo, when the truth is you’re just smart enough to not waste your time. Notorious liar Bill O’Reilly has used the accusation of fear repeatedly, but frankly I’d be more afraid of Honey Boo boo.

Furthermore, if Kurtz even bothers to take his own analysis seriously, then why doesn’t he apply it to Republicans? He seems so disturbed that a single administration official is waving off Fox News, but he doesn’t seem bothered at all that the entire Republican Party is boycotting MSNBC. Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee has stated publicly that there will be no GOP presidential primary debates on that network. There will be four on Fox. Therefore, according to his own logic, Kurtz is implying that that every single one of the GOP candidates for president are afraid of Rachel Maddow?

What’s even more interesting about this is that the GOP candidates are even afraid of the friendly venues they have chosen for themselves. The RNC has drastically reduced the number of debates and assumed control of who will moderate them and ask questions. That was done to avoid a repeat of the embarrassing displays put on by Republicans during the 2012 election cycle. On one hand that may be a wise decision on their part considering the proclivity for Republicans to say stupid things. On the other hand it shelters them from the real world of political brawling that might toughen them up for the general election. And it exposes them as fearful of letting their candidates express themselves by taking positions for which they would later be held accountable.

After being left off of a preliminary list of networks that would be interviewing Holder, Fox News VP Michael Clemente whined that Holder’s reluctance to subject himself to the petty carping of Fox’s confirmed haters does a disservice to “the interests of a free press.” Apparently he doesn’t understand the phrase “free press.” You have to wonder where he gets the notion that a free press requires every public figure to submit to every media outlet, no matter how disreputable and hostile. It would be more correct to applaud Holder for showing respect for a free press by declining to validate Fox’s deceitful brand of pseudo-journalism.

Whether or not Holder grants Fox News an opportunity to malign him in person, it is clear that neither he, nor anyone else, is afraid of Fox. They just show it the measure of respect it deserves. But Republicans are demonstrating that they terrified of MSNBC and every other media outlet, including Fox, by implementing a policy that prohibits them from engaging in any public debates that aren’t sanctioned by the party apparatchiks. That’s a story that Kurtz will never report.

For Americans concerned about how to identify the terrorists in your neighborhood, Fox News has created a convenient tool to be certain that nefarious characters are not overlooked and permitted to wreak havoc.

The Fox News Terrorist Color Chart

Inspired by the comments of Fox News anchor Shannon Bream during an episode of Outnumbered, this chart is an essential part of every patriot’s anti-terror toolkit. Bream was responding (video below) to co-host Kennedy’s observation that ordinary profiling may not be an effective prevention policy because “sometimes bad guys don’t look like bad guys.” Whereupon Bream offered this bit of wisdom:

“That’s my question about these guys. If we know they were speaking unaccented French and they had ski masks on, do we even know what color they were, what the tone of their skin was? I mean, what if they didn’t look like typical bad guys as we define them when we think about terror groups.”

Yeah, what about that? Obviously the only way we can be sure to keep America safe from bad guys is to have a reliable means of categorizing them so that they can be segregated from the rest of the population and punished appropriately. And thankfully the folks at Fox News are on the case and looking out for us good (i.e. white) guys.

The Fox News interview of Reza Aslan, author of Zealot, was one of the most pathetic displays of journalistic bias and incompetence in recent memory. The interviewer, Lauren Green, has been roundly and deservedly criticized for her amateurish attempt to ambush her guest and foment a fake controversy. The response from media professionals has been been nearly unanimous that Fox botched the affair.

However, Fox, true to form, stiffens their back and refuses to accept responsibility for an embarrassing episode and slink away with some sense of humility. They have characteristically fought back with ferocious intensity, defending their anchor and slandering their guest. Numerous articles have already appeared on FoxNews.com, but the full-on blitzkrieg took place on the air with anchor Shannon Bream fluffing the head of the uber-rightist Media Research Center, Brent Bozell.

Bozell led off his sycophantic exculpation by declaring that “I’ll be the first one to applaud Lauren Green for the question that she asked.” Bozell insisted that it was entirely appropriate to impugn Aslan repeatedly while ignoring any actual discussion of his book. He further asserted that Aslan should have confessed to having a bias, saying that…

“If he is going to take the attitude that he is just a scholar, he just happens to be Muslim, that he really doesn’t care about this issue so much, he’s not a very good Muslim.”

Bozell, a devout Catholic, may not be the best person to make that judgment. But more to the point, Aslan is indeed taking the attitude that he is a scholar who happens to be Muslim. Therefore, according to Bozell, he is not biased. Bozell actually seems to be complaining that Aslan isn’t more deferential to his faith, in which case he would be a “good” Muslim and biased. But Aslan isn’t cooperating with Bozell’s conspiracy theory.

As for anchor Shannon Bream, she could not have been more complicit with Bozell’s determined smear tactics. She opened her report saying…

“It started out with very far-left media questioning Lauren, criticizing her, saying she shouldn’t have asked the question, or that it was any of her business what his prerogative may have been on writing the book. It then trickled out into more and more mainstream media and it’s taken on a life of its own – the discussion about Lauren versus the book or the author.”

In point of fact, not a single critic ever suggested that Green should not have asked Aslan about his faith or his motivation. The criticism was that she never stopped asking about it. She obsessed over it despite his having answered her several times. Then Bream has the gall to complain that the story in the media was more focused on Green than on the book. That’s exactly what Aslan complained about throughout Green’s ridiculous interview.

The blockheaded incoherence exhibited by Green, Bream, and Bozell, was illustrated perfectly by the graphic that Fox displayed during Bozell’s segment. It read, “Liberal media attacks Fox reporter.”

In case you’ve been stationed on a lunar base for the past several years, Fox whining about attacks from the liberal media is evidence that their cerebral cortexes have atrophied. Fox has been on a non-stop campaign of attacking every other media outlet as dishonest, dangerous, even treasonous, since the day they launched. Fox’s slogan, “fair and balanced,” is itself an assault on the integrity of their competitors. For a sampling of how Fox deals with their media peers…..

Liberal media attacks as Woodward ‘threat’ seen as political threat to Obama

What the Liberal Media Are Missing

Racism charges a first-class way for liberal media to attack

Liberal media’s hateful obsession with Sarah Palin

Liberal Media Admits ‘The Democrats Have Lost on Sequestration

Liberal Media’s Dilemma Covering Obama’s Libya Decision

The Liberal Media’s Assault on Christianity

Opinion: The Liberal Media Loved Obama To Death

Liberal Media Panic Reaches Boiling Point

This list could go on and on. And it doesn’t even include the personal attacks leveled by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Eric Bolling, the Fox & Friends crew, etc. Fox spends more time on attacking the rest of the media than they do on reporting the news. But to be fair, they hardly ever report actual news, so that isn’t a particularly revealing criticism.

The Second Amendment Solutions crowd has been spoiling for a fight with the Obama administration for years. The President nearly outsmarted them in his first term with a wily strategy of doing nothing about guns except for loosening restrictions in federal parks.

However, that tactic did not fool these Bravehearts. They knew that the real plot was to lay low until the second term and then confiscate anything with a trigger. At least that’s the theory of sweaty-palmed freaks like NRA boss Wayne LaPierre and gun rights evangelist John Snyder. This week on Fox News Snyder weaved a tale of firearms confiscation that would drive Ted Nugent into the fetal position under his bed. And of course, Fox Nation published it as their top headline:

The inquiry in the headline as to whether Obama is bypassing congress on guns is based on – well, nothing at all. There have been no statements from the White House, no bills drafted in Congress, no leaked memos, not even any Capital whispers or pillow talk. This entire wannabe controversy was hatched by Snyder and his assertion that he has confidential sources who have revealed the plot to him. He told Shannon Bream on Fox News that…

“There is a move by the gun grabbers in congress to try to ban semi-automatic firearms or certain semi-automatic firearms, but they probably will not get very far with this proposal because there simply is not public support for it. So the gun grabbers probably would then rely on their boy in the White House to use executive order in this way to try to ban them to keep law-abiding citizens to be able to obtain these firearms for legitimate purposes.”

Snyder could not offer a single shred of evidence that any of that was true. Although I’m sure he was sincere about his racist characterization of the President as the “boy in the White House.” It’s one thing for some goon on the InterTubes to make wildly unsupported claims about conspiracies to violate the Constitution, but for Fox News to invite him on the air for a “serious” discussion is irresponsible and a breach of journalistic ethics. Therefore, it was the perfect story for Fox. And Bream was all too happy to shed any facade of reportorial dignity when she closed the interview by saying…

“Well the White House each time this gun issue has come up has said that the President and the White House have no intention at all of depriving Americans of their second amendment rights, but we know that there’s also a U.N. treaty that the U.S. has now evolved in negotiating and hammering out that would also deal with gun rights so we’ll keep a close eye on what you’ve tagged and on that treaty as well.”

Apparently it wasn’t enough to give a platform to a nutjob spewing inane conspiracy theories, Bream had to sweeten the pot by connecting it to another paranoid plot that is also patently untrue. When all is said and done, it is curious why anyone would care much about this. Because even without their guns, right-wingers have plenty of firepower they are able to aim at the President. Later the same day, Fox Nation posted this article featuring Sure-Shot Cheney:

For some reason, the emotionally stunted editors at Fox can’t seem to reference Obama without there being some horrific and bloody threat to his life injected into it.